This year saw the loss of many notable figures who found international fame in worlds as varied as pop culture, politics, sports and literature.
They included the singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson, fashion designer Roberto Cavalli and actor James Earl Jones of Star Wars and Lion King fame. Political figures who died included Alex Salmond, who led Scotland to the brink of independence in 2014, while the movie world lost Roger Corman, one of the most prolific producers in the history of film.
Here we remember the lives of ten other well-known people whose deaths made headlines in The Irish Times, and around the world, this year.
Alexei Navalny
Russian politician, Putin critic
Alexei Navalny, who died on February 16th aged 47, was one of the most prominent domestic critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin. He died in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle where he had been serving multiple sentences on charges his supporters say were trumped up to silence him.
He was jailed after returning in 2021 from Germany where he was recuperating from a nerve-agent poisoning in Siberia that he blamed on the Kremlin. He was given three prison terms after his return and was moved to a different prison with harsher conditions each time. Late last year, he was feared dead after he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to the penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Despite increasingly difficult conditions, which included solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team published investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile. The Kremlin had tried to cut him off further by arresting several of his lawyers last year on charges of being part of an extremist group.
In 2021 he was awarded the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament for his work on human rights. Three months after his death, his widow accepted the Dresden Peace Prize on his behalf.
His memoir, published after his death, revealed he believed he would die in prison.
[ Thousands defy Kremlin to show up at Alexei Navalny’s funeral – The Irish TimesOpens in new window ]
OJ Simpson
American football player, criminal
OJ Simpson, who died at the age of 88 on April 10th, was an American football player who was charged with murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. He was acquitted in 1995, but was later found guilty in a civil trial and was also jailed for other crimes.
He was one of the most popular athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after a record-setting career with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers. He went on to enjoy a career as a sportscaster and actor and appeared in commercials.
When Brown Simpson and Goldman were found stabbed to death, Simpson emerged as a suspect. Days after the killing, he fled in his white Ford Bronco and a slow-speed chase through Los Angeles ensued before he was charged with the murders. He was controversially acquitted in a televised trial that transfixed the US. Later found liable for the deaths in a civil trial, he was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages to the families.
He also served nine years in a Nevada prison after being convicted in 2008 on 12 counts of armed robbery and the kidnapping of two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint. He was released from parole in 2021, at the age of 74.
Alice Munro
Writer
Alice Munro, who died on May 13th aged 92, was a Canadian short-story writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She wrote short stories for more than 60 years, often focusing on life in rural and small-town Canada.
In awarding her the Nobel in 2013, the Swedish Academy referred to her as “a master of the contemporary short story”, and praised her ability to “accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages”.
Her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968 and won the governor general’s award for fiction in Canada. Munro reached international critical attention when her work began to feature in the New Yorker, from 1977. She won the governor general’s award for fiction in Canada twice more, for Who Do You Think You Are? in 1978, and for The Progress of Love in 1986. Who Do You Think You Are? was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980 under the title The Beggar Maid.
In 2009, she won the Man Booker International prize for her overall contribution to fiction. The judges lauded her skill for bringing “as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels”.
Her last work, Dear Life, was published in 2012, when she was 81.
[ ‘I loved Alice Munro’s stories more than any I have ever read’ – The Irish TimesOpens in new window ]
Donald Sutherland
Actor
Donald Sutherland, who died on June 20th aged 88, was a Canadian actor whose work spanned six decades.
Known for his versatility, he had almost 200 credits to his name, and they ranged from a pot-smoking college professor in National Lampoon’s Animal House to Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.
After studying acting in London, he worked in theatre in Scotland and secured some small television roles in series such as The Saint and The Avengers. He landed his breakthrough role in the second World War action film The Dirty Dozen and that performance led him to winning one of the lead roles in M*A*S*H, the satirical wartime series.
Movies such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kelly’s Heroes, Klute, Ordinary People, Don’t Look Now and JFK followed and he worked steadily for decades. He starred alongside his son Kiefer in A Time to Kill in 1996, and in 2012 he found a new generation of film fans when he took on the role of President Snow in the Hunger Games franchise.
He won two Golden Globes for best supporting actor for the TV movies Citizen X (1996) and Path to War (2003), a Primetime Emmy for Citizen X and an honorary Academy Award in 2017.
[ Actor Donald Sutherland, star of Hunger Games and Don’t Look Now, dies aged 88Opens in new window ]
Sven-Göran Eriksson
Football manager
England’s first overseas manager Sven-Göran Eriksson died on August 26th at the age of 76 after a managerial career that spanned more than four decades.
The Swede’s management career began with Swedish teams Degerfors and IFK Göteborg. His international breakthrough came when he guided IFK to win its first Uefa Cup final. This led him to manage teams such as Benfica, Sampdoria and Lazio and his success made him one of Europe’s most highly regarded managers.
Nevertheless, his appointment as England manager in 2001 was lambasted by some tabloids because he was not English. He would go on to lead the country to the quarter-finals in two World Cups and in the Euro 2004 tournament.
His personal life provided much fodder for the tabloids and his phone was hacked by the News of the World between 2002 and 2006. Just before the 2002 World Cup tournament, it was revealed Eriksson had had an affair with fellow Swede and television presenter Ulrika Jonsson. After the now-defunct News of the World secretly recorded him in 2006 expressing interest in the Aston Villa job, the FA announced he would step down after the World Cup.
He went on to manage a host of clubs and countries, including Manchester City, Leicester, Mexico and the Philippines. His final job in football was as sporting director at IF Karlstad before pancreatic cancer forced him to quit in 2023.
[ Former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson dies, aged 76 – The Irish TimesOpens in new window ]
Totò Schillaci
Footballer
The former Italy striker Salvatore “Totò” Schillaci, who scored the goal that knocked Ireland out of the 1990 World Cup, died on September 18th aged 59. Italy lost on penalties to Argentina in the semi-finals but Schillaci’s goal in their third-place victory over England brought his tally for the tournament to six, making him the leading scorer and earning him the Golden Boot, and player of the tournament award.
He was a wild-card pick for that squad and wasn’t expected to feature prominently in the tournament but all that changed when he was brought on in the late stages of Italy’s opening match against Austria. He broke the goalless deadlock with a header and kept on scoring in the days that followed.
From Sicily, Schillaci started his career at Messina and went on to play for Juventus and Inter Milan. The 1990 World Cup marked the peak of his career and his football-playing days ended in Japan with Júbilo Iwata when he was 34.
He later ran a soccer school in Palermo and appeared in a number of television shows, including Italy’s version of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. In 2002 he played himself in a TV advert for Smithwicks ale, smilingly popping up in an Irish pub as the surprised locals looked on.
Maggie Smith
Actor
Maggie Smith, who died on September 27th aged 89, was a prolific award-winning actor whose work ranged from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Harry Potter to Downton Abbey.
She won an Academy Award in 1970 for playing the waspish teacher Jean Brodie and received another nomination for best actress in 1973 for Travels with My Aunt. In 1979, she won an Oscar for best supporting actress, and a Golden Globe for best actress, for California Suite.
Her gift for acid-tongued comedy was often lauded but she also thrived in serious dramatic roles, performing opposite Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre, winning a best actress Bafta for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s Hedda Gabler.
The Oxford-born actor excelled in period dramas such as A Room With a View and Gosford Park. Downton Abbey brought her a whole new level of fame and earned her three Primetime Emmy awards. Younger viewers came to love her when she took on the role of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series.
Her collaborations on stage and screen with Alan Bennett were always well received and their 2015 film, The Lady in the Van, was a late-career triumph. Aged 84, she reached a new high in her six-decade career when she took on the one-woman play A German Life in London’s Bridge Theatre.
Ethel Kennedy
Human rights advocate
Ethel Kennedy was a lifelong human rights advocate who endured a series of tragedies that included the assassination of her husband, Robert F Kennedy snr, and the deaths of two of their children. She died on October 10th, aged 96. She was the mother of former independent presidential candidate, turned Donald Trump ally, Robert F Kennedy jnr.
She was a college roommate of RFK snr’s younger sister Jean and was formally introduced to her future husband during a ski weekend in Quebec. Her passion for politics was so consuming that she was often said to be “more Kennedy than the Kennedys” and she campaigned tirelessly for her husband and other Kennedys. She was pregnant with the couple’s 11th child when RFK snr was shot when he was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the Democratic primary in his bid to become US president, five years after his brother, JFK, was assassinated.
She was passionate about social causes, including the rights of migrant workers, the rights of Native Americans and a variety of environmental causes. She founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights which honours exemplary work by journalists and human rights advocates.
In 2014, the US president Barack Obama awarded Ethel Kennedy the Presidential Medal of Freedom for dedicating her life to advancing the cause of social justice, human rights, environmental protection and poverty reduction.
[ Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F Kennedy snr, dies at 96 – The Irish TimesOpens in new window ]
Liam Payne
Singer
Liam Payne died on October 16th, aged 31, after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires. His death prompted questions about the support and protection offered to young people in the music industry after it emerged that the singer had alcohol, cocaine and a prescription antidepressant in his system when he fell.
His love of singing was apparent from an early age and he auditioned for X Factor twice, first when he was 14, and again two years later. On the second occasion, in 2010, he was put together with four fellow contestants to form a boy band, One Direction. They finished third and Simon Cowell signed them to his label for a reported £2 million.
The band sold some 70 million records and became the first band in the history of the US Billboard chart to see their first four albums debut at No 1. Payne established himself as a songwriter and by the time of 2014′s Four, his name appeared in the credits of eight of the album’s 12 tracks, including its lead single, Steal My Girl.
The band split in 2016 and his debut solo single Strip That Down reached number three on the UK singles chart the following year. His album, LP1, debuted at number 17 on the UK albums chart in 2019.
Quincy Jones
Music producer
Quincy Jones was an American musical performer, producer, arranger and composer who worked with a “who’s who” of figures in the music industry. He was 91 when he died on November 3rd.
The roster of singers and musicians he worked with included Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and Count Basie.
At 14, he started playing in a band with a 16-year-old Ray Charles, and he once backed Billie Holiday. He played trumpet in Elvis Presley’s band and was Dizzy Gillespie’s musical director and arranger when he was 23.
A job at Mercury Records led to him working with artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee and Sammy Davis Jr. He also began scoring films, clocking up credits for The Italian Job, In the Heat of the Night and The Color Purple.
He produced Off the Wall, Bad and Thriller – still the biggest-selling album of all time – for Michael Jackson while his film and TV production company launched the career of Will Smith with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air sitcom.
Jones won 28 Grammy awards, received seven Academy Award nominations and won an Emmy award for the theme music he wrote for the television series Roots in 1977. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. He was posthumously awarded an honorary Oscar two weeks after his death.
